aphenine

Life at the moment is slowly turning out to be slowly better.

Living on my own is something I'm slowly getting used to. Sometimes the loneliness can be crippling, and that's less good. But, on the plus side, being able to cook for myself, control what I eat and have space to exercise with the Wii ready to hand if I need it is starting to pay dividends for my health and figure. I've been slowly loosing weight, feeling a bit more lively and sleeping better at night. And the best bit? All of this is happening while not having to listen to my mother tell me about how to loose weight and exercise.

At work, I didn't suffer any negative consequences for my drinking binge (if anything, quite the opposite) and things have calmed down a bit. Most wonderfully, on Monday, I and a select group of people working on Savings were all singled out with the injunction from the main boss being that of "if you walk up to any of us, think very carefully if you need to bother us", the net result being that people have been harassing me a lot less than normal.

Additionally, on the second project, other people are starting to engage in it and I'm seeing people slowly react to it. It's good because other people are bearing some of the load and the reactions were were not as bad as I feared. The new person I'm managing is also slowly working out and today one of the others took him under their wing for a bit, leading them through a project I started, freeing me up to work.

I still feel down about not being able to have kids sometimes and it's always worst on Mondays, but it's slowly not turning into the be-all and end-all of everything right now, and also, with the Eurovision party in the weekend, I'm reminded there are people out there who I like and who like me and I should see more. It helps with the loneliness a lot.

Something I've never done in my life has happened to me last weekend. I stayed behind at work to drink with colleagues. I needed to blow off a little steam as work was very stressful this week and has been for the last month or so and woke up the next morning in a a pool of my own vomit at my desk.

I'm working across two major projects, both of which are incredibly important to the company. One of them involves major refactoring of code, which was started but not finished last week. I still had to finish that up and make sure everything worked, even though I was supposed to hand off to someone else.

The other involves implementing savings for our product. That's been one of my most successful projects so far, and I'm revisiting it again, only this time with changes. As I've been trying to work on it, I've noticed how the refactoring I've done has destroyed my own productivity and annoyed the hell out of me, much like it's annoyed the colleagues in my team.

The refactoring is necessary and I've done a whole bunch of it very well, especially on the front end. But in terms of the backend code, it looks like I jumped ahead too far and now I feel like I'm trying to extricate myself from a compromising situation.

Admittedly, I'd probably not quite have gotten myself in this situation if I hadn't been trying to get rid of the first project in order to start the second, but not only haven't I managed to get rid of it, I'm also managing a new person and so have to actively figure out where we're going next on it. I still have a plan and mostly the plan is holding, but I keep bumping across new things that need thinking about and require more work and that's a problem.

It's a difficult situation and I'm probably coping well. I know people notice and appreciate my work (thanks to the drunken conversation), but the stress does need management. I'm not a natural leader and here I am on point for a lot of things. It's a lot of weight for my young shoulders and a lot of pressure.

I'm pretty sorry about the situation and I think I'm going to swear off alcohol for the next while. I don't think it will come and bite me, but I don't think I cleaned up very well and I hope people are not too mad at me in the morning.

Another year, another Christmas. This one was a quiet one, with little in the way of stress. We were supposed to have family around, but that never really happened, because they were very ill with the flu/virus thing that's going around.

I'm still waiting for things to happen regarding job stuff. Randomly, today, I had a visit from a medical professional regarding my ESA claim. You know, the one I had two years ago, recovering from the surgery. Two years too late... The whole thing makes me angry.

Life is proving a bit wobbly at the moment. I'm not completely sure about my mental health right now and it bugs me a bit. I think that probably most of it is me feeling a bit worthless after all the other stuff I've written about recently and I'm starting to take that out on myself by doing stuff that probably isn't probably good for me.

On the plus side, my sleeping pattern has deteriorated and then slipped through the night. I'm now waking up quite early and that means I have peaceful quiet time to sit and code. I'm finding that the coding is going quite well, though I still feel a lot of the time that I'm not very good at it.

I'm feeling a bit drained by everything. My emotions are still cycling from not being able to have children. Sometimes it's just purely that, sometimes I find a way to make peace with things and live with myself. It's weird. However, the peaceful periods don't tend to last very long.

I'm not entirely sure why, but it looks like two things are interfering. I'm not sure how big in and of themselves they are and whether they are major things in their own right, or whether they're parts of the same thing that makes me feel bad. I guess that's what this post is about.

So, the first one is remembering childhood stuff. This ties in with working at the school and working in general, not standing up for myself and other such things. Pre-surgery, I didn't have much of a problem doing that. However, I had the support of my parents to fall back on and that was the main cause of my strength. As I'm preparing to leave, I'm starting to realise just how much that support has meant to me.

I always thought that I'd get along fine. I managed it back before, in my twenties and always thought that, if I could cope by myself, while undergoing major mental illness due to gender dysphoria, I'd be easily able to cope once I sorted that out.

Only, I worry that, with the not being able to have children stuff, that's never going to happen. I'm realising that the support of your parents gets changed into the support of your partner. I'm screwed without that and transition just makes me feel even more dependent. It doesn't help that my body is saying "become more dependent, so you can have the babies you want" and it isn't helping that, even were I to want to adopt, I'd have to be dependent on a partner anyway.

The idea terrifies me. But lots of women do it and suffer few bad effects. On the other hand, they usually get to be the mother of someone's child and cherished for that. I can't see that happening to me, ever.

Sometimes, I can see myself as the mother of a child, anyone's child, in terms of adoption. That scares me, though, in the sense I don't think I would bond and the disconnect between "I would totally love my own child, if I had one" and "I don't think I can love anyone" is starting to get a little odd and it's making me wonder why.

It's also a bit odd in that, before the surgery, I used to be fine about loving the world and making everyone in it my child, in that sense. It kinda worked for me and I enjoyed it. It kept me sane and I'm not sure what's happening now that I feel like that's permanently gone from me.

I guess part of it is that, well, I've always hoped that I could get some of that expression through work. I could love the people around me and be useful and successful that way. But that's not how work works. There are professional boundaries and if I try that, someone will take it away from me as inappropriate anyway. So I've learnt not to do that.

Another part of that, however, may also be something to do with my childhood and how I was brought up. I'm starting to realise that a lot of the sadness I felt when I was very little, a lot of the emptiness, came from knowing I wouldn't be able to have children when I was young. By young, I mean around 7/8.

I can remember those things and all of that seemed to have crystallised when I went to secondary school. I certainly felt sad about stuff I could not quite identify and some of that stuff feels very similar to the childlessness stuff I'm going through now.

Given that I'm feeling that I'm useless, worthless and deserve to die because of it, I'm kinda terrified about how that affected me when I was young and, looking back, the answers are not good.

I have no emotional connection to huge chunks of my emotions and schooling period. When I was working in the school, they was an assumption that you use your appreciation of childhood, in which you were taught well, and you use that to become a good teacher.

I have to say, I wouldn't trust those parts of my childhood. They were uniformly bad. If I used that as a template for dealing with children, I would not handle it very well. I haven't been handling it well. I'm starting to realise that all of that is causing me to bottle a lot of stuff up and not talk to people. And I need to. I need to at least make certain actions based on this, otherwise, I'm going to tear myself up inside and explode.

This is perhaps the longest I've ever gone on here without writing something, which is in itself unusual. I've been doing a bit more writing on Facebook, where people I actually know are. It seems easier to get messages out to the people who know me.

On the other hand, this is still the best place to write out thoughts and feelings on those occasions I'm not sure that I know how or what to do with them.

On the whole, life is going pretty well. I have a job lined up in Bristol for which I'm just waiting for certain bits of paperwork to come through. It will mean moving to another city to start a new life, but I will be able to live better than I have here, so.

I'm also writing a computer game. It's bizarrely going. It's been a long standing ambition of mine. One I thought I'd given up with transitioning, but I need to have something creative to do and writing a computer game provides that, especially when I start to dwell on bad things too much.

The tract of life that isn't going well is that the children thing keeps bothering me, as does the fact that I'm not in a relationship. I'm not really sure where all of this is coming from, but I really feel the pressure that, well, the thing that men want out of women is babies. I can't do that, so no one is ever going to love me. I'm not going to be happy. I'm not going to be successful, where success is seeing all your children grow up and have children of their own.

I can see the happiness part of that sitting there, just permanently out of reach and it bothers me. I don't want to be permanently unhappy for the rest of my life and, well, I'm not sure there's any way that's not a guaranteed thing.

Adoption should be a way of making that better, but it bothers me more. I'm kinda worried that I wouldn't love a child just dropped into my care. I'm worried no one would want to support me through raising a child that isn't their own. I find it odd that my brain thinks that I would totally sort myself out and pull myself together if I could have a child of my own, but not apparently otherwise.

I can feel the social pressure to do it, I'm watching too many shows where people partner up and start a family and have children, so even normal methods of diversion are just making me think about it too much. I feel kinda guilty about the fact that I can't, which is crazy, because it's not that I won't but that I can't.

It's not just this, but I can see how the whole process has eroded my growing up, and why I tried to really not think about it for the last few years. I don't really know if I'll ever think of myself as a worthwhile human being.

I'm not long back from a short trip to Budapest with my parents.

It was pretty amazing. We had an appartment in a great location, inside the main restaurant/nightlife area.

The River Danube cuts through the heart of the city north-south, and one side (the Buda, or west side) is very hilly, while the other (the Pest or east side) is absolutely flat. As a result, it has some lovely views, probably the nicest in any city I've seen, with some of the best from the castle complex located on a ridge in the centre of the city.

Apart from this, there's thermal hot baths, where even in the winter months you can bathe outside, the second oldest metro system in the world (and the oldest electrified too), and it has one of the nicest parliament buildings anywhere.

I'd thoroughly recommend it to anyone looking for a short city break.

I'm going to be off on a holiday trip for a few days soon, for a few days. It should be interesting and a welcome break from the routine. I decided to tag along with my parents, as I travel well with them and my mother is good at planning breaks. However, that means I really want to make the next one completely lacking in parents. I need to do some striking off on my own. I hadn't realised how much my mood is tied in with getting a bit of independence.

Programming is going fine, surprisingly. I had a major showstopping bug a few days ago that pretty much destroyed my sense of self-confidence and worth, but I read up around it, left it alone and then, suddenly, everything twigged again one walk home. I came home, did the changes that were in my head and everything fit, more or less, and worked properly.

The short answer is that I really don't understand asynchronous code, which is how Javascript works. It's a completely different way of writing code from everything I've ever done, because statements that come directly after something else aren't executed directly after that thing, not if they're related to some future event that is yet to happen.

I've also been doing some writing. I'm going through one of those phases where there's a lot of stuff trapped in my head but I haven't yet managed to figure out how to get it out. There's too much and my head feels like a pressure cooker. Writing is alike a release valve. It helps let things out. Mainly, I'm going back through something I've written, which is a fragment of an action/adventure fantasy story, and I'm just changing numerous broken bits that I'm not happy with, to give the story the right flow it needs. There are a couple of plot-flow elements that don't add up, and they've been bugging me. So I've made some down-payments in fixing these, even if it means leaving out huge great chunks of the story.

I might post it later, just to see what people think, but I don't see that one going anywhere per say. It's based on some childhood ideas I had which, in hindsight, are kinda childish and reveal a lot about trans issues I didn't know about then, but there's a certain sense of catharsis to writing it and, well, I've aimed for a simple action/adventure story, which ignores a hell of a lot, which is to the good.

I do not really know what's happening with me at the moment. Life has gotten... complicated, in a way I don't really understand.

One of the things that pretty much hit me out of the blue is that there's been this lovely person I've been doing lots of kink with for a while. It's been something pretty gentle and wonderful to go back to again and again. I managed to learn a lot about my body and how it works in its new configuration, while having some level of comfort and control over the whole process.

Somehow, in no way I can identify, the whole thing started going into proper relationship territory and, well, yesterday, I ended up ending it. I had to because, well, I got to know the person and, grrr, incompatible gender identities. Which sucks. A lot. I have been crying. A lot. Yeah, go me.

Somehow, this person just completely snuck under my skin and I didn't notice. I'm so hard and cynical on the outside, but I totally let this person get past all of that. I didn't even think to stop them. Or that it meant anything.

The whole thing has dredged up feelings and memories I have not had for a while. Certainly I've not thought I was even capable of. It was lovely having someone in my life, to talk to, cuddle up to when I needed it. Also for other things.

Apart from that, I've slowly been cooking my own food each day.

I subscribed to Hello Fresh, something verazea uses and which I first thought too fussy, but now I adore. I sign up for three meals for 2 each week and, on Sunday evening, I get a box of meals which I cook during the week.

It's been good so far. The food is particularly appetising while the meals are interesting and intricate without being gaudy and fussy. Some have worked better than others, but all have been, on the whole, good. I've picked up small techniques from the recipes and if I keep this up, I should be quite an accomplished cook.

It's been awesome to take care of myself, by myself. It's given me a sense of empowerment. Not only that, but the food is easily paid for by me, out of my budget. Even on my pay I can afford it and the simple cost per week makes budgeting for food easy. I know how much I'm going to spend. I still have a lot left over and my lifestyle, though very spartan, isn't unenjoyable.

In terms of health, I've been slowly able to work a bit longer. Last weekend I was wiped out. This weekend, I'm not. I want to do something fun and enjoyable. Not sure what, but I'll see.

I also had some chats with people about fitness today and it's been playing into something I've been thinking, that I might be ready to start an actual fitness regimen. I've kept alive my gym membership for a while out of misplaced optimism. I was finally going to cancel it. I've changed my mind. Though, in reality, I'm far from going back.

However, I do feel I might be at that stage of fitness when I first came back from Birmingham, broken in body and in mind. I started doing Wii Fit, slowly, the most basic exercises. Also a bit of the dance games. It's time to do that again. Slowly, surely, I will heal.

Life has been a bit of a mixed bag this week.

I heard back from Tesco and they said, well, not no, but they didn't say yes either. They told me I lacked confidence and that, although I possessed the technical skills they needed, they wouldn't take me on that reason. But, they told me, fix that, and everything would be fine.

This was nearer the beginning of the week and, well, I got angry, I cried and, well, to cut a long story short, after I cried in a quiet corner at work at the unfairness of life, the universe and everything, I got a bit angry and then promptly proceeded to get focused so that, by the time things had died down, I went through masses of work and dramatically bolstered a flagging team.

The next day, as a result of my labours the night before, the next queue in the admin process was dramatically overloaded, so I started working on that, and doing OK. They then asked me to come in during the day for the last two days of the week, which was awesome. Working during the day is so much better than working in the evenings.

I'm still due to work in the days, although I'm not sure if this is permanent. It marks a huge improvement. Also, they have me doing things that involve things other than loading, the data entry process they hired me for initially, which is a boon to my poor brain, which has been deprived of sufficient stimulation.

It also sounds like I heard back from a PhD placement I enquired about and, that also seems to be a positive thing, I think, but I've missed the deadline for this year by a week or so. Not a terrible tragedy and, probably, a blessing in disguise. I need to follow it up properly, but I think it means that, should everything else fail, I could do another PhD. This is valuable to know and is good as a back-up plan.

Added to that, the gentle level of work I've been doing seems to have had a generally bolstering effect on my health. I seem to be brighter, I'm not as tired all the time and things are much better. There's still a long way to go, but things are better and, when they keep me in the daytime, I don't feel so depressed. I even have evening which, as my stamina improves, I can use to enjoy.

Clouds on the horizon at the moment include that the current extra responsibilities at work mean that I can kill someone and I'm vastly more responsible than I was. I'm at the end of a chain and instead of my work being checked by others, I'm doing that checking. It's terrifying and stressful. There is no training and if I make a mistake, it all gets escalated quickly.

Also, my parents returned last week and, well, things are always more difficult with them around. I'd like to move out, but my salary won't let me. I'd like to give my mother some rent, so I can feel a bit more entitled to the house's resources, but my mother said no.